About Me

Known principally for his weekly political columns and his commentaries on radio and television, Chris Trotter has spent most of his adult life either engaging in or writing about politics. He was the founding editor of The New Zealand Political Review (1992-2005) and in 2007 authored No Left Turn, a political history of New Zealand. Living in Auckland with his wife and daughter, Chris describes himself as an “Old New Zealander” – i.e. someone who remembers what the country was like before Rogernomics. He has created this blog as an archive for his published work and an outlet for his more elegiac musings. It takes its name from Bowalley Road, which runs past the North Otago farm where he spent the first nine years of his life. Enjoy.

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The blogosphere tends to be a very noisy, and all-too-often a very abusive, place. I intend Bowalley Road to be a much quieter, and certainly a more respectful, place.So, if you wish your comments to survive the moderation process, you will have to follow the Bowalley Road Rules.These are based on two very simple principles:Courtesy and Respect.Comments which are defamatory, vituperative, snide or hurtful will be removed, and the commentators responsible permanently banned.Anonymous comments will not be published. Real names are preferred. If this is not possible, however, commentators are asked to use a consistent pseudonym.Comments which are thoughtful, witty, creative and stimulating will be most welcome, becoming a permanent part of the Bowalley Road discourse.However, I do add this warning. If the blog seems in danger of being over-run by the usual far-Right suspects, I reserve the right to simply disable the Comments function, and will keep it that way until the perpetrators find somewhere more appropriate to vent their collective spleen.

Followers

Tuesday, 5 August 2014

Reaping The Whirlwind

Dresden, February 1945: Our parents and grandparents received the news of Dresden's destruction with equanimity. We were at war. By 1945 the civilian population of Germany had ceased to be "collateral damage", they were now regarded as legitimate targets. Israel's deliberate targeting of civilians in Gaza is not without precedent.

SUCH A BRIEF RESPITE.
Barely time to find water – let alone food. And all around the shelter fires
blazing unchecked. She did not tell her children what she had seen in the
streets. Could not admit, even to herself, what lay there. Where was God, she
wondered, amidst all this death? As if in answer, the sirens wailed again,
their harsh note of alarm rising and falling like the cry of some gigantic
beast in pain. In the shelter they could already hear the ominous drone of the
bombers. And then, the thud, thud, thud of the bombs.

God may have been absent from Dresden on St Valentine’s Day
1945, but the Devil was there and he had brought the fires of Hell with him.

My wife and I have been arguing about Gaza. She demands to know
what benefit Israel could possibly derive from deliberately bombing and
shelling innocent women and children? I asked her what benefit our
grandparent’s generation derived from ordering the bombing of Dresden – a city
packed with refugees posing no threat to either the British, the Americans or
the Russians? By February 1945 the Allies were driving Adolf Hitler’s
battered armies before them and in less than three months the war in Europe
would be over. Why unleash a firestorm on one of Germany’s most beautiful
cities? Why kill 25,000 people, most of them women and children, needlessly?

“The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish
delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to
bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw and half a hundred other places, they
put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they
are going to reap the whirlwind.”

Those words may sound harsh to New Zealanders living in the
twenty-first century, but in the ears of our parents and grandparents they
sounded both true and just. In the eyes of Hitler’s enemies, Nazism was an
unmitigated evil which had to be destroyed – by any means necessary.

Once a nation thrusts itself into the unrelenting horrors of
war, its over-riding priority is to end them, on the most favourable terms
possible, as quickly as possible.

Almost exactly 100 years ago, at the outbreak of the First
World War, Great Britain’s first lord of the admiralty, Winston Churchill,
ordered the Royal Navy to institute a complete naval blockade of Germany. Of
this ruthless strategic decision he would later write: “The British blockade
treated the whole of Germany as if it were a beleaguered fortress, and avowedly
sought to starve the whole population – men, women, and children, old and
young, wounded and sound – into submission.”

These are not pleasant facts to dwell upon. The
terror-bombing of civilians. The deliberate starvation of whole populations.
And yet, these were, indisputably, the tactics employed by “our side” in both
world wars. Unsurprisingly, when paying our respects to “the glorious dead” on
ANZAC Day, we prefer to draw a veil across the inglorious death we inflicted in
return.

I wonder, were it possible to travel back in time and
confront our parents’ and grandparents’younger selves about these measures; if we could demand to know their
justifications for acquiescing, without protest, in these crimes against
humanity: how would they respond?

I think they would look at us strangely. I think they would
shake their heads in disbelief. I think they would reply, simply: “We are at
war.”

That same incomprehension is similarly imprinted on the
faces of Israelis when the world demands to know why their jets and artillery
are pounding Gaza until the rubble bounces; why the whole of the Gaza Strip is
being treated, in Churchill’s words, “as if it were a beleaguered fortress” and
why “the whole population – men, women, and children, old and young, wounded
and sound” are being ruthlessly bombed and shelled and starved into submission.

“Does the world not understand that we are
at war?” Israel asks.

“They that sow the wind, shall reap the whirlwind.” So said
the Prophet Hosea. If Bomber Harris could quote the Bible, can Israel not quote
the Torah?

Gaza, July 2014.

Such a brief respite.
Barely time to find water – let alone food. And all around the UN school fires
blazing unchecked. She did not tell her children what she had seen in the
streets. Could not admit, even to herself, what lay there. Where was Allah, she
wondered, amidst all this death? As if in answer, the sirens wailed, their
harsh note of alarm rising and falling like the cry of some gigantic beast in
pain. In the shelter they could already hear the hideous screech of the jets.
And then, the thud, thud, thud of the bombs …

This essay was
originally published in The Press of Tuesday,
5 August 2014.

9 comments:

I abhor warfare as strongly as the most passionate pacifist.It appears that the Jews of Israel and their children have gone from being the abused under Nazi Germany to being the abusers.Let us not forget that Hamas and others in the Middle East deny Israels right to even exist.I don't think there will ever be peace in the Middle East. As a Jew and a human being I am profoundly sad...

Strategic bombing was usually justified on the grounds of un-housing and destroying the morale of the German worker rather than simply revenge.What most people seem to forget is that Gaza is under occupation. The people have both a right and a duty to resist this. They are also at war, so perhaps they're allowed to do their version of strategic bombing?

Your analogy of Dresden and Gaza is so misleading as to be almost propaganda. The Palestinians have never been the invading fascist machine the Nazis were, they have been the victims from start to finish. The Zionist regime fits the bill as Nazis but no one is bombing them! The genocidal assault cannot be justified by the Guy Fawkes missiles Hamas have provocatively aimed at Israel. Yes though impotent those missiles have assaulted the Israeli's legitimate desire to feel secure in their own land, but this does not justify a slaughter and massacre of innocents because of the fools Hamas. Gaza and Israel are not equal or at war, rather Gaza is an open prison strictly controlled in every way, a ghetto, by the Israeli military. Israel has committed horrifically cruel war crimes against a defenceless people blowing to bits women children and babies. Israel has sown the wind as the World looks on in revulsion and disgust at this monster succoured by the war criminal state the US.

I agree with FT and GS. The Dresden bombing and others were terrible but there was some excuse. The war had to be pursued in WW2, Germany was not giving up, the war could not be stopped unilaterally. Ordinary people are secondary in the total concentration on war planning defence, attack, and supply of forces and civilians. with a slim moral standard of behaviour that is breachable.

Time and again Israeli generals have played with Palestine, talks have been abandoned because of some deliberate act that shatters trust. I have not heard the back story to the death of these three young Israelis, all from a religious school. Muslims use living sacrifices to cause havoc. The Israeli government seems mendacious and fanatical enough to offer three of their religious and idealistic males the chance to serve Israel by being killed by their own people to justify the severe attacks and genocide of Palestinians. I am sure Palestinians are regarded in the same way as Jews were smeared in propaganda films likening them to fleeing rats.

Was the Tokyo fire bombing justified. The civilians were making backyard munitions, and horribly bombed by USA. In Gaza there is so little space that anywhere must be used for dual or triple purposes.

Chris, an excellent piece. I must admit to wavering between your and your wife's view. The comments above indicate your message has not been taken in properly. The situation of the Palestinians is tragic, but they are pawns. Your description of German naivety and Bomber Harris is sound. I wonder why Israel does not send its whirlwind to Iran and the sources of rockets and funding. Attacking Gaza almost seems like attacking Austrian cities rather than Germany.

Funny, when there is someone you don't like doing stuff you don't like and you can't quite bring yourself to condemn them for some reason, you call them pawns. Which is really, really insulting. That's what the government used to say about teachers – they were pawns of their union leaders. Which was really funny because whenever I went to a union meeting it was the teachers that were pushing the leaders rather than the other way round. I suspect that the Palestinian people pretty much know what they're doing.

GS: Yes of course the Christians in Mosul should simply tell ISIS leadership to behave. Pew research (google it) tells us that well over 50% of Gazans disapprove of Hamas. When only one side has the guns it makes the comparison to a teacher union meeting somewhat ridiculous at first. But then I can easily imagine the majority of teachers being happy with status quo and the few with extremist positions motivated to go along and urge leadership to ever more extreme behaviour. So there is a parallel.

If you found my comparison ridiculous, then you didn't read my statement properly. The essence is in the word pawn. You refuse the people of Gaza any agency at all. Having said that, yes more than 50 percent might disapprove of Hamas, but they did elect them in the first place, and it does not make them pawns. And while we're on the subject, the irony is that Israel encouraged to groups such as Hamas as a counterweight against the PLO. Now THEY are reaping the whirlwind.